Animalinside

The fourteenth in the Sylph Editions Cahiers series of pamphlets
consists of fourteen images by the German artist Max Neumann, each with
an accompanying text by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai.
Krasznahorkai ventriloquises the strange beast that Neumann depicts, a
dog-like creature that appears only in silhouette. It speaks with barely
contained savagery, obsessively repeating and reforming its thoughts.
Susan Sontag described Krasznahorkai as ‘the Hungarian master of
apocalypse’, and Animalinside shows him at his most apocalyptic. The
final painting shows the beast facing a mirror image of itself, perhaps
its twin, on the surface of a barren earth: ‘Only the bare crust of the
earth remains, only the thick black dead cold ashes, in which we stand
facing each other, tensed, on each side pure muscle, and now there is
only the question: which of the two of us shall be king.’